James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Next time your gallery dealer asks you for an Artist’s Statement, don’t despair. Instead of sweating over writing one yourself, just use this all-purpose Artist’s Statement Generator.

It’s easy! Choose a line from Column 1, a line from Column 2, and a line from Column 3, stick ‘em together, and you’ll mystify the best of them.

"My recent work is:

Column 1An exploration of the irreducible act of mark-making...An investigation of the mimetic process...An excavation of the inheritance of the past...A disquisition on our shared narratives...

Column 2...which seeks to unravel the threads of visual discourse ...which delves into the connectedness of the real and the abstract...which re-encodes ambiguity and authenticity...which reveals the undercurrents of ritual

Column 3...by creating a conversation between color and texture."...by disjunctively animating it through a process of mimicry." ...by mediating clichés through a retro-nostalgic lens."...by alluding to tropes of the built environment."

Jeez, I just had to submit one of these a couple weeks ago. Still, this was a treat.

Great to see the word "trope" two days in a row!

The only other overworked word you might thrown in there is "interface." You know, "by exploring the interface between the subjective and the objective ontological didacticism."

In my AS, I did manage to extend my gratitude to Jon Gnagy for getting me started. But, without any art courses or degrees, I had to describe myself as "self-taught." I acknowledged this left me with not the greatest of teachers, but we get along well.

Wish you also had a generator for prefaces/introductions to artbooks.Although it can't be that difficult - just generate a couple of dozens of these random combinations and you're fine.

But there are exceptions.The introduction to an artbook by the eccentric Phil Hale was written by a close friend...or was he?

I've resented Phil Hale for eight years now[...]Looking at Phil's work from the last decade, I have the strong sense that he is holding something back. I believe his best work is still to come. Phil Hale is not a great artist. Yet.

I have a pile of these ultra-pretentious and completely clueless "artist statements" somewhere in my studio.

I once went to an opening of pomo paintings by an acquaintance who had graduated from an Ivy League school. The art was abysmal and pre-schoolish, as you might imagine. But the Artist's Statement... that was really something.

As I was reading it I was shaking my head in disbelief. Then I looked up and saw from across the gallery that my pomo friend had been watching me read. She had this look on her face that was just devastating... I got the sense that she knew she was completely lost. And that, for all the incredible financial debt she had piled up to finance her education, she also knew that all she had been taught was to be a rank fraud.

I read not long ago about a computer program that will generate english papers in dense postmodernese....Its indistinguishable from real postmodernist writing since both are just gibberish that means nothing while sounding erudite.

I suspect it could be easily adapted to writing artist's statements. When I get a couple of semesters of programming under my belt (I take my first one next semester) I may give it a try.

For an absolutely hysterical time, make sure you get the audio guide to any large modern art museum. My absolute favorite is at the Moma. When they come to De Koonings Woman 1

http://www.art-interview.com/Issue_008/Issue_images/deKooning_001.jpg

and the pompous curator with a strong french accent starts doing somersaults with words, I cant take it any more and end up ripping the headphones from my ears with disgust. I think i only ever made it past 2 or three works in there before giving up on the guide.

A funny thought just occurred to me. All museum charge about 5 bucks for the guides, EXCEPT all the modern ones. I find that very interesting...

Same goes for trying to read the single spaced, 2 page long "explanation" as to why you just paid 15 bucks to see absolute rehashed bullshit at the entrance of any large retrospective show at the same place.

Wonderful! This is so funny and soooooooooooo needed to be said out loud!

I've just highlighted this post on Twitter and in my resource about How to write an Artist's Statement with the suggestion that it's absolutely essential reading anytime an artist feels tempted to "obfuscate"!

Hilarious and so true!! Reminds me of the ludicrous requirement to pass an "oral" exam (weighted more than artwork itself) to graduate college as a Master of "visual" art! If you could impress the professors with outlandish explanations, you earned the right to be called a good artist...if not a used car salesman.

A very well known Japanese artist hates writing artist statements so much, she tends to suddenly "forget" how to speak or write English every time she has a show in the States, and requests the curator write for her. She then enjoys a good hearty laugh at the result. It's an inside joke that is made even funnier at the fact that no one in the museum/gallery industry is aware she finds the whole thing hysterically funny in it's pretentiousness.

Just loved this. I so often come across just this sort of verbiage from artists who take themselves far too seriously and whose use of the English language is limited to using a mass of words where simplicity often gets the point across.I must use this as a cv at some point and so perhaps get taken more seriously :)